According to a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the
West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on
our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes
involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has
taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living
world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through
and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At
bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in
physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some
people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold
no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And
there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or
another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals
in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism — or
don't call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it,
except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a
politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of
the academy — or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of
the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: "I find this view antecedently
unbelievable — a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. . . .

I
would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to
seem laughable in a generation or two." Nagel is an atheist; even so, however,
he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism;
far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on
materialist naturalism.

Nagel is not afraid to take unpopular positions, and he does not seem to
mind the obloquy that goes with that territory. "In the present climate of a
dominant scientific naturalism," he writes, "heavily dependent on speculative
Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against
attacks from religion, I have thought it useful to speculate about possible
alternatives. Above all, I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not
regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the
world." Nagel has endorsed the negative conclusions of the much-maligned
Intelligent Design movement, and he has defended it from the charge that it is
inherently unscientific. In 2009 he even went so far as to recommend Stephen
Meyer's book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent
Design, a flagship declaration of Intelligent Design, as a book of the
year. For that piece of blasphemy Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said
to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical, ignorant,
mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in general a less than
wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of letters.

His new book will probably call forth similar denunciations: except for
atheism, Nagel rejects nearly every contention of materialist naturalism.
Mind and Cosmos rejects, first, the claim that life has come to be just
by the workings of the laws of physics and chemistry. As Nagel points out, this
is extremely improbable, at least given current evidence: no one has suggested
any reasonably plausible process whereby this could have happened. As Nagel
remarks, "It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a
well-confirmed scientific hypothesis."

The second plank of materialist naturalism that Nagel rejects is the idea
that, once life was established on our planet, all the enormous variety of
contemporary life came to be by way of the processes evolutionary science tells
us about: natural selection operating on genetic mutation, but also genetic
drift, and perhaps other processes as well. These processes, moreover, are
unguided: neither God nor any other being has directed or orchestrated them.
Nagel seems a bit less doubtful of this plank than of the first; but still he
thinks it incredible that the fantastic diversity of life, including we human
beings, should have come to be in this way: "the more details we learn about the
chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more
unbelievable the standard historical account becomes." Nagel supports the
commonsense view that the probability of this happening in the time available is
extremely low, and he believes that nothing like sufficient evidence to overturn
this verdict has been produced.

So far Nagel seems to me to be right on target. The probability, with
respect to our current evidence, that life has somehow come to be from non-life
just by the working of the laws of physics and chemistry is vanishingly small.
And given the existence of a primitive life form, the probability that all the
current variety of life should have come to be by unguided evolution, while
perhaps not quite as small, is nevertheless minuscule. These two conceptions of
materialist naturalism are very likely false.

But, someone will say, the improbable happens all the time. It is not at all
improbable that something improbable should happen. Consider an example. You
play a rubber of bridge involving, say, five deals. The probability that the
cards should fall just as they do for those five deals is tiny — something like
one out of ten to the 140th power. Still, they did. Right. It happened. The
improbable does indeed happen. In any fair lottery, each ticket is unlikely to
win; but it is certain that one of them will win, and so it is certain that
something improbable will happen. But how is this relevant in the present
context? In a fit of unbridled optimism, I claim that I will win the Nobel
Prize in chemistry. You quite sensibly point out that this is extremely
unlikely, given that I have never studied chemistry and know nothing about the
subject. Could I defend my belief by pointing out that the improbable regularly
happens? Of course not: you cannot sensibly hold a belief that is improbable
with respect to all of your evidence.

Nagel goes on: he thinks it is especially improbable that consciousness
and reason should come to be if materialist naturalism is true. "Consciousness
is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only
on the resources of physical science." Why so? Nagel's point seems to be that
the physical sciences — physics, chemistry, biology, neurology — cannot explain
or account for the fact that we human beings and presumably some other animals
are conscious. Physical science can explain the tides, and why birds have
hollow bones, and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness.
Physical science can perhaps demonstrate correlations between physical
conditions of one sort or another and conscious states of one sort or another;
but of course this is not to explain consciousness. Correlation is not
explanation. As Nagel puts it, "The appearance of animal consciousness is
evidently the result of biological evolution, but this well-supported empirical
fact is not yet an explanation — it does not provide understanding, or enable us
to see why the result was to be expected or how it came about."

Nagel next turns his attention to belief and cognition: "the problem that I
want to take up now concerns mental functions such as thought, reasoning, and
evaluation that are limited to humans, though their beginnings may be found in a
few other species." We human beings and perhaps some other animals are not
merely conscious, we also hold beliefs, many of which are in fact true. It is
one thing to feel pain; it is quite another to believe, say, that pain can be a
useful signal of dysfunction. According to Nagel, materialist naturalism has
great difficulty with consciousness, but it has even greater difficulty with
cognition. He thinks it monumentally unlikely that unguided natural selection
should have "generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the
truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances." He
is thinking in particular of science itself.

Natural selection is interested in behavior, not in the truth of belief,
except as that latter is related to behavior. So concede for the moment that
natural selection might perhaps be expected to produce creatures with cognitive
faculties that are reliable when it comes to beliefs about the physical
environment: beliefs, for example, about the presence of predators, or food, or
potential mates. But what about beliefs that go far beyond anything with
survival value? What about physics, or neurology, or molecular biology, or
evolutionary theory? What is the probability, given materialist naturalism,
that our cognitive faculties should be reliable in such areas? It is very small
indeed. It follows — in a wonderful irony — that a materialistic naturalist
should be skeptical about science, or at any rate about those parts of it far
removed from everyday life.

This certainly seems right, and perhaps we can go even further. Perhaps it
is not initially implausible to think that unguided natural selection could have
produced creatures with cognitive faculties who are reliable about matters
relevant to survival and reproduction. But what about metaphysical beliefs,
such as theism, or determinism, or materialism, or atheism? Such beliefs have
little bearing on behavior related to survival and reproduction, and unguided
natural selection couldn't care less about them or their truth-value. After
all, it is only the occasional member of the Young Humanist Society whose
reproductive prospects are enhanced by accepting atheism. Given materialist
naturalism, the probability that my cognitive faculties are reliable with
respect to metaphysical beliefs would be low. So take any metaphysical belief I
have: the probability that it is true, given materialist naturalism, cannot be
much above .5. But of course materialist naturalism is itself a metaphysical
belief. So the materialistic naturalist should think the probability of
materialist naturalism is about .5. But that means that she cannot sensibly
believe her own doctrine. If she believes it, she shouldn't believe it. In
this way materialist naturalism is self-defeating.

II.

The negative case that Nagel makes against materialist naturalism seems to me
to be strong and persuasive. I do have the occasional reservation. Most
materialists apparently believe that mental states are caused by physical
states. According to Nagel, however, the materialistic naturalist cannot stop
there. Why not? Because the idea that there is such a causal connection
between the physical and the mental doesn't really explain the occurrence of the
mental in a physical world. It doesn't make the mental intelligible. It
doesn't show that the existence of the mental is probable, given our physical
world.

Some materialists, however, seek to evade this difficulty by suggesting that
there is some sort of logical connection between physical states and mental
states. It is a logically necessary truth, they say, that when a given physical
state occurs, a certain mental state also occurs. If this is true, then the
existence of the mental is certainly probable, given our physical world; indeed,
its existence is necessary. Nagel himself suggests that there are such
necessary connections. So wouldn't that be enough to make intelligible the
occurrence of the mental in our physical world?

I suspect that his answer would be no. Perhaps the reason would be that we
cannot just see these alleged necessities, in the way we can just see
that 2+1=3. These postulated necessary connections are not self-evident to us.
And the existence of the mental would be intelligible only if those connections
were self-evident. But isn't this a bit too strong? Why think that the mental
is intelligible, understandable, only if there are self-evident necessary
connections between the physical and the mental? Doesn't that require too
much? And if intelligibility does require that sort of connection between the
physical and the mental, why think the world is intelligible in that extremely
strong sense?

Now you might think someone with Nagel's views would be sympathetic to
theism, the belief that there is such a person as the God of the Abrahamic
religions. Materialist naturalism, says Nagel, cannot account for the
appearance of life, or the variety we find in the living world, or
consciousness, or cognition, or mind — but theism has no problem accounting for
any of these. As for life, God himself is living, and in one way or another has
created the biological life to be found on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere as
well). As for the diversity of life: God has brought that about, whether
through a guided process of evolution or in some other way. As for
consciousness, again theism has no problem: according to theism the fundamental
and basic reality is God, who is conscious. And what about the existence of
creatures with cognition and reason, creatures who, like us, are capable of
scientific investigation of our world? Well, according to theism, God has
created us human beings in his image; part of being in the image of God (Aquinas
thought it the most important part) is being able to know something about
ourselves and our world and God himself, just as God does. Hence theism implies
that the world is indeed intelligible to us, even if not quite intelligible in
Nagel's glorified sense. Indeed, modern empirical science was nurtured in the
womb of Christian theism, which implies that there is a certain match or fit
between the world and our cognitive faculties.

Given theism, there is no surprise at all that there should be creatures like
us who are capable of atomic physics, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and
the like. Materialist naturalism, on the other hand, as Nagel points out, has
great difficulty accounting for the existence of such creatures. For this and
other reasons, theism is vastly more welcoming to science than materialist
naturalism. So theism would seem to be a natural alternative to the materialist
naturalism Nagel rejects: it has virtues where the latter has vices, and we
might therefore expect Nagel, at least on these grounds, to be sympathetic to
theism.

Sadly enough (at least for me), Nagel rejects theism. "I confess to an
ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design
alternative [i.e., theism] as a real option. I lack the sensus
divinitatis that enables — indeed, compels so many people to see in the
world the expression of divine purpose." But it isn't just that Nagel is more
or less neutral about theism but lacks that sensus divinitatis. In The
Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a candid account of his
philosophical inclinations:

I am talking about something much deeper — namely, the fear of religion
itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I
want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most
intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. . . . It
isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my
belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I
don't want the universe to be like that.

Here we have discomfort and distress at the thought that there might be such
a being as God; but this discomfort seems more emotional than philosophical or
rational.

So is there a strictly philosophical problem with theism, according to
Nagel? As far as I can see, the main substantive objection that he offers is an
appeal to that notion of unity. A successful worldview will see the world as
intelligible; and intelligibility, as Nagel conceives it, involves a high degree
of unity. The world is intelligible only if there are no fundamental breaks in
it, only if it contains no fundamentally different kinds of things. Descartes,
that great dualist, thought that the world displays two quite different sorts of
things: matter and mind, neither reducible to the other. Nagel rejects this
dualism: his reason is just that such dualism fails to secure the unity
necessary for the world's being intelligible.

Yet is there any reason to think that the world really is intelligible in
this very strong sense — any good reason to think that there is fundamentally
just one kind of thing, with everything being an example of that kind, or
reducible to things that are? Here three considerations seem to be necessary.
First, we need to know more about this requirement: what is it to say that
fundamentally there is just one kind of thing? It is not obvious how this is to
be understood. Aren't there many different sorts of things: houses, horses,
hawks, and handsaws? Well, perhaps they are not fundamentally
different. But what does "fundamentally" mean here? Is the idea that the world
is intelligible only if there is some important property that houses, horses,
hawks, and handsaws all share? What kind of property?

Second, how much plausibility is there to the claim that this sort of unity
really is required for intelligibility? Clearly we cannot claim that
Descartes's dualism is literally unintelligible — after all, even if you reject
it, you can understand it. (How else could you reject it?) Is it really true
that the world is more intelligible, in some important sense of "intelligible,"
if it does not contain two or more fundamentally different kinds of things? I
see little reason to think so.

And third, suppose we concede that the world is genuinely intelligible only
if it displays this sort of monistic unity: why should we think that the world
really does display such a unity? We might hope that the world would display
such unity, but is there any reason to think the world will cooperate? Suppose
intelligibility requires that kind of unity: why should we think our world is
intelligible in that sense? Is it reasonable to say to a theist, "Well, if
theism were true, there would be two quite different sorts of things: God on the
one hand, and the creatures he has created on the other. But that cannot really
be true: for if it were, the world would not display the sort of unity required
for intelligibility"? Won't the theist be quite properly content to forgo that
sort of intelligibility?

III.

I come finally to Nagel's positive thesis. Materialist naturalism, he shows,
is false, but what does he propose to put in its place? Here he is a little
diffident. He thinks that it may take centuries to work out a satisfactory
alternative to materialist naturalism (given that theism is not acceptable); he
is content to propose a suggestive sketch. He does so in a spirit of modesty:
"I am certain that my own attempt to explore alternatives is far too
unimaginative. An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate
life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the
familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to
conceive."

There are two main elements to Nagel's sketch. There is panpsychism,
or the idea that there is mind, or proto-mind, or something like mind, all the
way down. In this view, mind never emerges in the universe: it is present from
the start, in that even the most elementary particles display some kind of
mindedness. The thought is not, of course, that elementary particles are able
to do mathematical calculations, or that they are self-conscious; but they do
enjoy some kind of mentality. In this way Nagel proposes to avoid the lack of
intelligibility he finds in dualism.

Of course someone might wonder how much of a gain there is, from the point of
view of unity, in rejecting two fundamentally different kinds of objects in
favor of two fundamentally different kinds of properties. And as Nagel
recognizes, there is still a problem for him about the existence of minds like
ours, minds capable of understanding a fair amount about the universe. We can
see (to some degree, anyway) how more complex material objects can be built out
of simpler ones: ordinary physical objects are composed of molecules, which are
composed of atoms, which are composed of electrons and quarks (at this point
things get less than totally clear). But we haven't the faintest idea how a
being with a mind like ours can be composed of or constructed out of smaller
entities that have some kind of mindedness. How do those elementary minds get
combined into a less than elementary mind?

The second element of Nagel's sketch is what we can call natural
teleology.His idea seems to be something like this. At each stage in the
development of our universe (perhaps we can think of that development as
starting with the big bang), there are several different possibilities as to
what will happen next. Some of these possibilities are steps on the way toward
the existence of creatures with minds like ours; others are not. According to
Nagel's natural teleology, there is a sort of intrinsic bias in the universe
toward those possibilities that lead to minds. Or perhaps there was an
intrinsic bias in the universe toward the sorts of initial conditions that would
lead to the existence of minds like ours. Nagel does not elaborate or develop
these suggestions. Still, he is not to be criticized for this: he is probably
right in believing that it will take a lot of thought and a long time to develop
these suggestions into a truly viable alternative to both materialist naturalism
and theism.

I said above that Nagel applauds the negative side of Intelligent Design
but is doubtful about the positive part; and I find myself in much the same
position with respect to Mind and Cosmos. I applaud his formidable
attack on materialist naturalism; I am dubious about panpsychism and natural
teleology. As Nagel sees, mind could not arise in our world if materialist
naturalism were true — but how does it help to suppose that elementary particles
in some sense have minds? How does that make it intelligible that there should
be creatures capable of physics and philosophy? And of poetry, art, and
music?

As for natural teleology: does it really make sense to suppose that the world
in itself, without the presence of God, should be doing something we could
sensibly call "aiming at" some states of affairs rather than others — that it
has as a goal the actuality of some states of affairs as opposed to others?
Here the problem isn't just that this seems fantastic; it does not even make
clear sense. A teleological explanation of a state of affairs will refer to
some being that aims at this state of affairs and acts in such a way as to bring
it about. But a world without God does not aim at states of affairs or anything
else. How, then, can we think of this alleged natural teleology?

When it comes to accommodating life and mind, theism seems to do better.
According to theism, mind is fundamental in the universe: God himself is the
premier person and the premier mind; and he has always existed, and indeed
exists necessarily. God could have desired that there be creatures with whom he
could be in fellowship. Hence he could have created finite persons in his own
image: creatures capable of love, of knowing something about themselves and
their world, of science, literature, poetry, music, art, and all the rest.
Given theism, this makes eminently good sense. As Nagel points out, the same
cannot be said about materialist naturalism. But do panpsychism and natural
teleology do much better?

Nagel's rejection of theism does not seem to be fundamentally philosophical.
My guess is this antipathy to theism is rather widely shared. Theism severely
limits human autonomy. According to theism, we human beings are also at best
very junior partners in the world of mind. We are not autonomous, not a law
unto ourselves; we are completely dependent upon God for our being and even for
our next breath. Still further, some will find in theism a sort of intolerable
invasion of privacy: God knows my every thought, and indeed knows what I will
think before I think it. Perhaps hints of this discomfort may be found even in
the Bible itself:

Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely,
oh Lord....Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your
presence?If I go up to the heavens, you are there;If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

This discomfort with theism is to some extent understandable, even to a
theist. Still, if Nagel followed his own methodological prescriptions and
requirements for sound philosophy, if he followed his own arguments wherever
they lead, if he ignored his emotional antipathy to belief in God, then (or so I
think) he would wind up a theist. But wherever he winds up, he has already
performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some
of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age.